The Advisor summoned me today to discuss what i'd been doing the past couple of weeks (nothing), and what i was planning to do with the rest of the summer (write this very intimidating book chapter, finish my data collection for our smaller study, prove the Riemann hypothesis, climb K2, win the Tour de France). Somewhere during the course of the conversation he said something like: "As you start thinking about your dissertation...", and i didn't really hear the rest of it because i went into a kind of coma. I'm definitely in denial that I'll ever actually produce a dissertation; it is one of those mythical events so far in the future as to be inconceivable, like the colonization of Mars. What does a dissertation even look like? I refuse to believe that it's merely a bound collection of paper. In my mind, it's like whatever was in Marcellas' suitcase at the end of Pulp Fiction, incandescent, not fit for the eyes of mortal man.